What is TCPA?

In 1991, the United States Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to restrict telephone solicitations including automated dialing systems and prerecorded voice messages to mobile phones. Over the years, the TCPA has expanded, raising additional liability concerns and decreasing productivity of contact centers. Now it can affect anything from customer service to market research to collections to fundraising, or anything else that involves customer contact activities.

Nelson v. Santander

The plaintiff accused the defendant, an automobile finance company, of violating the TCPA by placing over 1,000 calls to the plaintiff’s cell phone number and leaving 116 prerecorded messages over the course of a year in an attempt to collect two of the plaintiff’s auto loans.

The defendant had used an automated dialing system capable of running applications in both preview and predictive dialing modes to place outbound calls. The agent, operating in preview dialing mode, initiated the call by manually pressing a button on a computer screen rather than entering all ten digits on the phone keypad.

The case ultimately determined that whether or not preview dialing fell under the category of automated dialers was irrelevant. Rather, because the system used to make the call was able to make automated calls, the district court sided with the plaintiff and was awarded $571,000 in statutory damages.

So What?

The Rule of Consent

Consent, then, is the most effective way to minimize liability under the TCPA when dialing wireless numbers.

Know The Lingo

Reassigned Wireless Numbers – no liability occurs for the first call made through an autodialer to a reassigned wireless number, however, the caller is presumed to recognize that the number dialed has been reassigned.

Revocation of Consent – the most reasonable interpretation of the TCPA’s consent requirement allows consumers to revoke consent through any reasonable method if they so desire.

Enter: Intelligent PBX

• Live agents dial calls to wireless numbers on a digit-by-digit basis
• No calling lists are ever stored in the phone system or any similar system that has the capability of placing calls.
• Phone calls are never initiated via random or sequential dialing – this functionality has never existed in any IC system
• As a hosted system the Intelligent Contacts system cannot be modified and thus has no potential capacity to become an autodialer
• Users can configure complex compliance criteria the Intelligent Contacts Solution enforces
• Users can prove compliance with complete call recording, starting with the call initiation and ending with call termination
• The Intelligent Contacts Solution provides a compliance report to prove the user’s compliance with TCPA requirements
• Quality metrics, full call recording, and analytics tools minimize productivity losses while maintaining complete compliance with dialing restrictions

The Intelligent PBX Solution ensures compliance by solely supporting manual calls placed by authorized users on the system. It never initiates a call to the PSTN on it’s own and has no capacity, or potential capacity, to ever do so.

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